Soon after the Deepwater Horizon tragedy began in the Gulf of Mexico, President Obama imposed a moratorium on all off-shore drilling for oil and natural gas in the Gulf of Mexico.

The moratorium was lifted, finally, after a federal judge twice ruled the administration’s approach was illegal, but not soon enough to prevent thousands of jobs from being lost around the Gulf coast, and not just in the energy industry.

Despite the lost jobs and economic growth from the moratorium, the Obama administration policy transformed into a permitorium following the litigation in federal courts. For months now, federal bureaucrats in the Department of Interior and elsewhere in Washington have slow-walked drilling permit applications in every conceivable manner.